Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2
600M-parameter FastConformer-TDT transducer ASR from NVIDIA NeMo. Topped the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard in 2025 for English, with WER ~6.05% averaged across the leaderboard suite. Outputs word/segment timestamps natively and handles up to 24-minute audio in one pass.
If you have an NVIDIA GPU and only need English, Parakeet beats Distil-Whisper on both WER and latency. Outside that envelope, Distil-Whisper is easier to deploy.
Overview
600M-parameter FastConformer-TDT transducer ASR from NVIDIA NeMo. Topped the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard in 2025 for English, with WER ~6.05% averaged across the leaderboard suite. Outputs word/segment timestamps natively and handles up to 24-minute audio in one pass.
Strengths
- Leaderboard-leading English WER among <1B open ASR models
- Native long-form (up to 24 min) without chunking workarounds
- Streaming-capable transducer architecture, low latency on GPU
- Word-level timestamps without forced alignment
Weaknesses
- English-only — no multilingual coverage at all
- CC-BY-4.0 requires attribution; not as frictionless as Apache/MIT for product use
- NeMo runtime is heavier than whisper.cpp; CPU inference is impractical
- Tied to NVIDIA toolchain — ONNX/CoreML export is community-maintained, not first-class
Quantization variants
Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.
| Quantization | File size | VRAM required |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 0.3 GB | 1 GB |
Get the model
HuggingFace
Original weights
Source repository — direct quantization required.
Hardware that runs this
Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2.
Models worth comparing
Same parameter band, plus what's one tier above and below — so you can decide what actually fits your hardware.
Frequently asked
What's the minimum VRAM to run Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2?
Can I use Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 commercially?
What's the context length of Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2?
Source: huggingface.co/nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2
Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.
Related — keep moving
Verify Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 runs on your specific hardware before committing money.